Henry James

Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined
to the lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with
the crowd. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one
English speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect
and sticking for perfection. Of course I refer to that mighty
master of language and keen student of human actions and
motives, Henry James. In the last four years he has published,
I believe, just two small volumes, “The Lesson of the Master”
and “Terminations,” and in those two little volumes of short
stories he who will may find out something of what it means
to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish
is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard,
always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I
wish James would write about modern society, about “degeneracy”
and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he
would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would
say such awfully clever things about it, and turn on so many
side-lights. And then his sentences! If his character novels
were all wrong one could read him forever for the mere
beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run away
with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He
subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his
whole paragraph partake of the same predominating color.
You are never startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never
enraptured; always delighted by that masterly prose that is as
correct, as classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of
Mozart.

The Courier, November 16, 1895

It is strange that from “Felicia” down, the stage novel has
never been a success. Henry James’ “Tragic Muse” is the only
theatrical novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage
in it, a glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation
and the sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so
strangely and inextricably blended in that life of the green
room. For although Henry James cannot write plays he can
write passing well of the people who enact them. He has put
into one book all those inevitable attendants of the drama, the
patronizing theatre goer who loves it above all things and yet
feels so far superior to it personally; the old tragedienne, the
queen of a dying school whose word is law and whose judgments
are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of
course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who
beats and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable
until one fine morning she beats them down and
comes into her kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that
is to live through her. It is a great novel, that book of the
master’s, so perfect as a novel that one does not realize what a
masterly study it is of the life and ends and aims of the people
who make plays live.